Critical Community Maintenance Notice

Just spotted this on the top-level forum page:

http://community.wd.com/t5/Personal-Cloud-Storage/ct-p/pers_cloud_cat

Starting Monday, October 12, 2015, the WD Community will go into a read-only maintenance mode. The read-only maintenance mode will last for approximately one week while we do a major refresh of the community. Please be patient with us during this time.

For those with My Cloud storage products, we will be providing a temporary community where you may continue to share your experiences with the new My Cloud OS 3 update. We will make the temporary community available on that date.

Seems like good timing, when users are busy sorting out the OS3 problems… I guess that’s what the ‘temporary community’ is for.

I wonder how much of the forum will survive the ‘major refresh’…

if it is like the OS 3 update… it will add to the havoc… 

lets all go over to the QNap forums where it is quiet… 

bump…

cpt_paranoia wrote:

bump…

hey!! quite pushing…

Looks like this is the result. Can’t say I like the new forum software much.

@JAC70 - It grows on you - the first time I ran into a Discourse based forum, it was a total shock to me too. Here are just a few things that it does that I think you might like:

  • @ Mentions: If you need to get someone’s attention (for example if
    you needed @Bill_S for something) simply put an @ and their username
    and they will get an email notification that they were mentioned
    (this is configurable in your user profile).

  • Post by Email: Speaking of emails, you can reply to an email notification (either
    from an @mention or by watching the thread) and it will post your
    emailed reply as a response to the thread.

  • Live Preview: The text editor has a live preview, and will follow you even if
    you move to another thread - this way if you need to review another
    thread you won’t lose what you already entered.

Do you have any suggestions on ways it can be improved? We tried our best to make it look and feel close to the old design to help people with the adjustment.

Some constructive feedback.

Where are the useful sticky topics we used to have?
It’s very slow to draw pages.
Where are the user identifiers to tell you who is WD Staff? Oh, and ‘trust level’, and number of posts/kudos, to help people get some idea of whether the responder knows what they’re talking about.
On a tablet, when trying to enter text in the reply box, the entry box is squished off the page, and it’s not possible to scroll to the text you’ve already entered.
Sort out the ‘trust levels’; it looks like they’ve all been reset to ‘basic user’. I suspect you want them to reflect their previous ‘trusted/honoured etc contributor’ status.
Similarly, whilst I note that ‘kudos’ have become ‘likes’, the number of thread views seem to have reset to zero. It would be useful if the previous values could be continued, again to give people an idea of the usefulness of a thread.
What on earth are ‘badges’? Have I gone back to kindergarten, or something?
Is there a ‘mark all as read’ button? I currently have 322 things unread, and 22 new. I don’t think I’m going to go searching…
Whilst the ‘continuous scrolling’ list of threads might be very ‘facebook-like’, and cool [sarcasm], it’s a very poor way of getting to threads; Facebook is a very poor model to follow, since it is almost impossible to find an old post on Facebook. A paged list of threads allows you to skip to page n.
For long threads, is there a way of getting to the end? Or to a specific point (the paged vs scrolling problem again)? [Edit: the’x/y’ thing has a ‘bottom’ selector]

ps. What benefits was this new forum supposed to offer over the old? So far, I’m not seeing any benefit. [download all my posts might be useful]

[Edit: anyone at WD reading this? You asked for feedback, you got it. How about some response? Where’s the obvious ‘new forum feedback’ sticky? @Bill_S anyone?]

I found this by accident. Click on the 9/9 at the bottom of the post. It will open a menu to go to top or bottom or go to entry.

RAC

Looks like you can click on the unread. This will bring up the unread messages. Then you will be given two choices i the upper left. I don’t have them on my screen now but the one on the left will clear the unread count. The one on the right clears topic’s?

RAC

Oh God… It’s just like the BBC News website redesign! Dreadful…

I finally saw your post and my responses are in bold.

Migrating from one community platform to another does have its drawbacks. Those stickies are somewhere down the list of topics.

They are. Since this new forum does have a sticky mechanism, I had hoped the forum admin might have applied sticky status to the previous sticky threads; you know, the general FAQ, the WD videos, my Twonky FAQ, perhaps (since it was getting an average of 500 hits a week).

I’m not sure I understand what you’re talking about. The previous views were carried over.

The concept of a view count was carried over, yes, but all the thread view counts were reset to zero, Thus, old threads that were clearly identifiable as useful from the view count are no longer so obvious. Again, an issue of helping users identify useful information.

You can always bookmark or tag topics.

Yes, but as with Facebook, that system only works if you realise at the time that you might want to refer to the thread again. It’s no good if you see a query, and think ‘ah, I remember there was a thread about that a while ago; now, where is it…?’

It’s an apple and oranges kind of thing.

So, a change for change sake, then, rather than to meet a perceived need. More marketing puff…?

No… The change was something we needed to do. And, we honestly believe that once you users get used to, you may like it better.